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Rankings and search traffic fell off a cliff

One of my clients has a beast of a website built in ASP.NET (which causes me problems cos I don't have much experience in that)

It is a job-site that aggregates job opportunities from other job-sites and provides a job matching service by email etc.

They used to have great presence on Google naturally for thousands of job searches.

Since Penguin and Penguin 2.0 (I think) their traffic has fallen off a cliff.

I have been doing some "off-page" experimentation, seeing if we can fix a lot of issues by re-sculpting their backlink profile (seeing as it was after penguin). but what I have found is that some pages respond to this off page work but some just do not at all, despite how we approach it, such as disavowing previous links building fresh new top quality content links with natural anchor text etc....

Which has lead me to the conclusion that the wider issue is on-page and potentially site structure. Unfortunately as it is ASP.NET I am not so comfortable diagnosing the issues.

I think also some issues will be related to dupe content etc.... but I would LOVE to get some input from my learned Moz colleagues.

4 Responses

Penguin can and often does have page specific problems. In fact, most often it seems the homepages of many sites are most affected and seemingly Penguin 2.0 does a better job of targeting inner pages.

I have worked with several companies who are still struggling to rank their homepage after Penguin yet can generate traffic to their inner pages.

Firstly, I would not jump to assume there are lots of problems with the site, perform an audit if you are unsure but don't make this as an assumption. Use known penalty dates to review traffic and anoint the analytics so you can get a clear picture of which updates caused the traffic drops for a quick and easy way to get more intel.

More often than not I am now advising people to just start over on a new domain and redirecting the old (not with a 301) to the new. This is painful, and many folks are holding onto domains but if clean up is not working and is not practical to continue down this route then a clean domain gives you a fresh start.

I have just had a quick look at the backlink profile in OSE and it does not look like your standard penguinised site though. Are you sure about the cause of the loss of traffic? Do the drops coincide with known penguin dates?

Many thanks for your response. I have found the tools you recommended (Barracuda Panguin Tool and Link detox) extremely useful.

I have attached the barracuda results for allthetopbananas.com. It looks like Panda is the culprit.

Their link profile returned a result of "Low Risk" in Link Detox as expected, so I don't think Penguin is an issue.

If you have any further suggestions or direction from here, I would be most grateful. I am thinking that sites like this one, that have relied on basic on-page keyword optimisation and backlinks to attain their Google rankings in the past are now suffering because since Panda Google is putting more value on a wider set of signals such as social, authority, freshness, authorRank, mentions etc.. Would you concur with that?

So, we open it up and look at the omitted results and there are now over a hundred results and your clients site is in something like 95th position.

Conclusions?

The client site is basically a conduit to other sites like totaljobs.co.uk and re-purposes content available in several other locations. Therefore, they are being filtered as they are not the originator of the content and they bring nothing new to the table.

Your client needs to do a content audit and create descriptions of the jobs that add some value and uniqueness. Given how many other folks there are pumping out these same descriptions there is likely some opportunity there but the old model is broken and they have to bring some value.

Caveat - this was the quickest of quick looks but certainly, it seems there are no real mysteries here so just dig in and do some deeper analysis. I imagine the site might give copyscape.com a heart attack! :)

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